salvational novels

[seerseenbyseein]

A salvational novel is one that saves its reader the necessity of having to go down certain fruitless and/or life-wrecking paths to learn their lessons.

I have one: L'Assommoir by Zola. The evolution of a drunkard is described so vividly that having read this book in my youth cured me of not merely alcohol dependence, but of any sort of attraction to this substance in any of its guises.

Has anyone been changed in similar fashion through reading fiction? If so, share please what did it for you.

[seerseenbyseein]

Another novel, actually two novels, that taught me something powerfully are Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. From them I learned that what are called illicit love affairs can be had but at a price, often disastrously high. It's not worth the grief.

[Pompey Bum]

When I was 29, I read Charles Palliser's The Quincunx, a novel about what happens to people who lose their money. I've been a miser ever since (but retired early).

[seerseenbyseein]

Balzac and Trollope can probably teach wealth management too...they were obsessed with money. But, why shouldn't they have been? Both of them had to write hard and long--so much per line-- to float their boats.

[ennison]

I am an unreconstructed learn-by-my-mistakes kind of fellow. Maybe I should have tried harder to learn how to live from my reading. Too late now (sigh)